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Why hello Reader, You know the feeling when you hit a wall and just want to say, “screw it, I’ll hardcode it.” That’s me trying to get my bot to auto-place a wall regardless of the map. Querying the API for choke points, then trying to mathematically work backwards to place the buildings. The results were terrible. It was like my bot was blind, and that’s because… it was. I was stuck until I had a discussion with another builder in the community. That conversation completely shifted my…

It was 2 a.m. and I was completely exhausted. Honestly, I was mad at myself. The ladder pool had just updated. My hardcoded wall-off was completely broken. I sat there manually pulling X and Y coordinates for every new natural, paying down technical debt I swore I would fix last season. I put it off thinking I had more time, and the map changes forced my hand. You probably have code just like this hiding in your codebase right now. A piece of logic that only works because you explicitly told…

My AI is blind. At least, that’s what it felt like this week when I tried sending workers across the map, only for them to get clipped by enemies. Turns out, I just needed to give it better eyes. Here’s what I learned…